Thursday 25 February 2010

Reeth Demographics


I thought our followers may be interested in our patient demographics. We are just preparing to send our annual statistics off to the NHS at the end of March. 13 of you are over 90 years old and there are 80 people aged 80-89 which is pretty impressive.

Monday 15 February 2010

Evaluating your GP

Doctors will soon be regularly revalidated. The cycle of revalidation is 5 years and, much like an MOT, will make sure we are all road-worthy. The current system focusses on making sure GPs do regular educational updates, review their patient care and show how they have improved it, take part in an appraisal with a senior doctor each year and seek the views of their patients and colleagues on their performance.

Having gone through the system for a few years now, I welcome the recognition of my efforts to stay up to date across the wide range of specialities GPs cover. We spend quite a lot of time at RMC looking at patient care and trying to improve on what we do: the dispensary has a 'near miss' book similar to the system used by airline pilots in order to try and recognise error and implement changes to prevent mistakes and protect patients (most pharmacies have an estimated 1% error rate); as a practice we review all significant events, complaints and diagnoses of serious illnesses, such as cancer, to see if there is anything we can learn and improve on in the future; all members of the practice produce audits each year in their area of work, again to make sure we perform to a high a standard as possible.

Our patients can help to make this revalidation practice effective by letting us know when their care is good, when their care is not as good as they would expect, reporting when things go wrong and giving their views in national questionnaires and surveys.

A lot of the data on the practice is available through the NHS website, and in coming months, I hope to publish further information, beyond the statutory requirements to hopefully allow our patients to see the work behind the scenes.

Thursday 11 February 2010

Is alcohol the new smoking?

While numbers of smokers continue to fall, concern has focussed on the effects of harmful drinking on both health and society as a whole. Alcohol is a socially accepted drug and unfortunately we are seeing ever increasing numbers of health problems associated with harmful drinking- this is not necessarily the 'youth' binge drinking; harmful drinking can include folks who drink modest amounts each day, but cumulatively exceed their weekly limits. As well as increased risk of accidents and liver disease, alcohol also increases your risk of high blood pressure and the calories associated with it can increase your weight and put you at risk of diabetes and heart disease. Doctors are urging ministers to set a minimum price per unit of alcohol as a way of controlling harmful behaviour (this has worked in other countries without the sensible drinker seeing any significant cost in their weekly spend on alcohol). Unfortunately the drinks industry is a powerful lobbying body and prefer to demonstrate concern by sponsoring alcohol awareness campaigns (the evidence suggests that these are no benefit at all). A sobering thought is the amount spent on alcohol advertising compared to that spent on helping folks with problems.

For more info, go to: http://www.alcohollearningcentre.org.uk/Topics/Browse/AlcoholEffects/?

Wednesday 10 February 2010

Record Sharing

Most of you should have received the details of the proposed system for sharing your record summaries between healthcare professionals. Currently, all your records at the practice are kept confidentially and are not available outside of the surgery. The electronic records are stored off site in a secure server and even if the computers were stolen from the surgery, there is no patient sensitive material stored on them.

The proposed scheme intends to make your record summary (just the important details e.g. heart attack, asthma etc) , details of any allergies and repeat medication available to other healthcare professionals, e.g. A&E staff, out patient clinics. The idea is that this will allow better treatment in emergencies and out of hours and faster transfer of information between staff. Further information can be found at www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/systemsandservices/scr

The NHS states that the information will be 'secure and is protected by the strongest security measures available for handling data'. The blog would be interested in your views!

Thursday 4 February 2010

More cuts and ranting!

Channel 4 news ran a feature on hidden NHS cuts last night. Our own PCT is estimated to have a £9m deficit which has to be clawed back in the next financial year - practices are been asked to suggest ideas for savings. Cutting excessive spending is obviously sensible, but unfortunately there are many areas where spending is going ahead regardless of common sense. The PCT is concerned about the cost of A&E attendences by patients from nursing homes, who are, perhaps, sent in unecessarily by less experienced staff at local homes. They have funded community matrons, and one of their priorities is to bring the care homes up to standard to reduce unecessary admissions. All sounds quite sensible until you realise that these are on the whole private nursing homes, run for profit, providing below standard care in some instances, and the NHS is having to use its resources (people and money) to fix the problem!